Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director of the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) and HBO Vatican satire The Young Pope (2016), has made a name for himself as a master of scathing commentary on Italian society. His work is usually vast in scope, featuring a small handful of people perched on a privileged perspective, able to oversee the intricate workings of society that is grand, but in turn, crumbling. His films are authentically revealing — they’re sophistically crafted and thematically clear — but while his ideologies are always on display, they don’t necessarily give us a view of how Italian society and culture shaped him as a person. His oeuvre is empathetic to the struggles of his fellow humans, but the lens is usually pointed at others.
The Hand of God gives us an explicit insight into how Sorrentino became Sorrentino. A semi-autobiographical film, the director fictionalizes his adolescent years in 1980s Naples. Amidst the country’s Maradona fever, we follow teenaged Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) as rifts appear in his relationships with his jokester parents, Saverio (Sorrentino’s long-time collaborator Tony Servillo) and Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), and slacker older brother Marchino (Malon Joubert), in the face of marital and gender expectations and social tensions. It’s a lyrical, amusing, and strangely accessible work from Sorrentino, one that stands out from the autobiographical genre by its unique stylisations.
The Napolitano filmmaker has always focused on aesthetical beauty and a lightly absurdist humour, something that elevates The Hand of God from a typical autobiographical film to a story that never feels saccharine or indulgent. There’s a lot of love for the extended Schisa family (the non-violent ones, at least), and Sorrentino highlights their individual and collective weirdness by drawing out long silences when they witness something ludicrous.
The humour, largely, isn’t wholesome in tone — in a fitting immature style, the film spends a lot of time on sex, but rarely in healthy contexts. Whether it’s brothers joking about sleeping with their aunt, or an intimate hair-brushing scene with a much older woman, Filippo’s burgeoning sexuality is never shamed or judged, but it does make several scenes and exchanges feel a little gross. It’s impossible to say how honest these inclusions are for Sorrentino, but the larger point is more compelling; The Hand of God gets great joy from tapping into the oft-forgotten goldmine of laughing at what we’re not supposed to.
This extends to the whole Schisma clan, and the first half of the film relishes in the private and public family interactions that are all shades of strange. In a mix of precise blocking, confident line delivery, and an excellent chemistry in the ensemble, Sorrentino’s affection and lambasting of his family history is a sight to behold. Multiple times in the film, he frames his cast in static, striking positions, making them look like an amusingly mundane canvas painting.
The film’s heart lies with the central father and son; while Servillo giving a charismatic performance is always a sure thing, his scenes with Scotti build a solid emotional foundation to the various Schisma antics. Soon, a gut punch of a midpoint means our characters are thrown into recovering from something that undoes everything they thought dependable in the world. While it’s undeniably rich with emotion, the second half doesn’t have the same gripping quality as the first, and the various vignette-style sequences slightly drag once you realise they’re not all connected with the same effortless directorial hand. Filippo’s anxiety about his family unit dissolving are well dramatised before and after the midpoint, executed in a compassionate manner as we see what initially gave the teenager joy simply doesn’t work anymore.
Within this, there comes an issue in the film’s structure. As we move towards the denouement, the film jarringly remembers it’s about someone wanting to become a filmmaker, and while the interactions Filippo have with an obnoxious director are dripping with the grandeur and wittiness of Sorrentino’s best work, it makes the film’s closing scenes feel slightly disjointed. Still, it gives us the best lines of the film, with Filippo being asked the very probing, “You got something to say? Or are you an asshole like everyone else?”
The Hand of God works much better as a film about how a filmmaker we’re familiar with landed on his thematic interests, rather than showing what led them to picking up a camera. The pain that dominates most of the film hurts so much more because of the joy we’ve witnessed beforehand, but Sorrentino is interested in what pain does to a human trying to learn what matters to them in the world. In his filmography, it’s clear Sorrentino believes that pain can make us more empathetic; while he spends most of his time criticising the institutions that dominate Italian life, he’s never disinterested in the people at the centre of them. He’s always been able to pinpoint exactly why, in a world of pain, we should feel sympathy for those around us. And, with The Hand of God, now we know why.
